Fresh-catch grilling, red wine swilling, and a perplexing killing fill this breezy beach read.
In this mystery, a middle-aged Florida transplant deals with new friends, a hot fisherman, and body parts on the beach.
In Hanafee’s second book about inquisitive, wine-loving Leslie Elliott, the former Midwestern public relations executive now resides in Southwest Florida, where she attempts to start a new career as a mystery writer. Recently divorced, she also tries her hand at a new man: dimpled, sandy-haired Frank Johnson. Frank has a fishing boat and a spirited wife; supposedly he will soon part ways with one of them (spoiler alert: It won't be the vessel). One night while grilling fillets of fish at her condo, Leslie tells Frank she snooped inside a beachfront house under construction and found buzzards and a headless dog carcass. Frank reckons the house’s renovation is slow because the owner, widower Peter Thompson, lives primarily in Canada, and he suggests the dead animal was probably a coyote (but where’s the head?). The next day, Frank goes AWOL, and local children find a body in a boat on the beach. Yet when the sheriff arrives, the corpse is gone. Later, Leslie’s friend Deb Rankins and her art class find body parts on the shore, and the two women call the sheriff. But the sheriff—who told Leslie to mind her own business earlier when she called about the headless canine—again seems nonplussed. Leslie wonders: “Was there a killing spree in paradise that no one was talking about except for my friends and me?” Although thinking about Frank and writing her novel take up much of her days, she saves some time for dinners with Peter, who arrives to check on his house. It’s not clear in Hanafee’s story why two men are vying for Leslie’s attention, especially eye-candy Frank (“The man kind of takes your breath away”). And the crime novel fails to tie up loose ends, perhaps signaling a third installment starring the intrepid Leslie, who loves to look for clues and fears that she is “destined to be alone like the spinster ghost in the Tarpon Bar.” That said, juicy gossip about the community’s residents and amusing banter between Leslie and her mother—who confirms “There IS sex after 70”—make this enjoyable mystery’s pages turn quickly.
Fresh-catch grilling, red wine swilling, and a perplexing killing fill this breezy beach read.Pub Date: May 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-836473-1
Page Count: 268
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.
Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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